Women who make history rarely feel the need to adhere to others' narratives—and that goes double for Jewish women. So it's not surprising that when Radia Perlman, architect of many of the routing and bridging protocols that make the modern Internet possible, discusses her childhood, she casually disposes of the standard geek-culture heroic origin story: "I did not fit the stereotype of the 'engineer.' I never took things apart or built a computer out of spare parts." Irene Greif, a fellow computer scientist who brought ethnographers, anthropologists and sociologists into systems design through her field of computer-supported cooperative work, cheerfully admits: "I have a whole history of always choosing marginal roles and in marginal subjects of research and so on for myself." Her work, though, has turned out to be anything but marginal.

June 15, 2013

MIT’s Shafi Goldwasser won the Alan M. Turing Award for her work in computer cryptography, which revolutionized internet security.

Contrary to popular opinion, librarians have been leaders in the digital revolution, and Henriette Avram was one of the most prominent members of the vanguard. With no formal training as a librarian—indeed without a college degree—she almost single-handedly developed MARC, the file format that makes books and other forms of information discoverable.